Golf Digest Tries Out Woman On Cover

Magazines

I have new professional responsibilities at the newspaper these days, but my greatest concern is finding a cure for a bedeviling illness: an inability to hit a fairway wood.

That's why I eagerly peeked at the new Golf Digest - but did a double-take upon confronting its October surprise.

I've forgotten how to hit a fairway wood, a type of club one uses to hit a ball long distances while attired in loud polyester pants and playing golf.

Once fairly adept with a fairway wood, I now resemble a drunken giraffe swinging a broom. That's why I quietly said ''hallelujah'' when I picked up Golf Digest and saw the picture of a famous player, Corey Pavin, on the cover next to the headline, ''Fire Up Your Fairway Woods: How to Buy 'Em, How to Play 'Em, How to Nail 'Em.''

Great. But then I saw another copy of the magazine with the exact same headline but with a female star, Juli Inkster, on the cover, not Pavin.

Inside were different first-person accounts of what somebody like me should try to do when faced with this predicament. Pavin, as Editor Jerry Tarde noted in a phone chat, tended to be somewhat mechanical and technical in his tips, while offering the reader shoulder and extension drills in which one is told to grab the top of a club with both hands and turn his body without swinging the club.

Inkster's approach is based more on feel, with suggestions for the proper tempo and rhythm. The drill she suggests is a slow-motion one and different from Pavin's. The rest of the magazine is identical.

What I had confronted was a circulation test by the nation's best golf magazine. Although its circulation of 1.4 million is predominantly male, and its cover subjects are virtually always men, it is experimenting to see if either of October's issues sells better on newsstands.

The vast majority of its circulation is subscription, and those folks will get the Pavin cover. But on newsstands there will be a mix of Pavin and Inkster, with the latter to be found in 60 markets, including Niagara Falls, N.Y.; Boise, Idaho; and Midland, Texas.

This is a gambit magazines occasionally try to test the success of different cover images, but it's a first for Golf Digest. It wants to see if a rarity, a woman on its cover, will sell.

Indeed, if male duffers are smart, they will snap up the Inkster cover. As Tarde agreed, the way most male amateur golfers play more closely resembles female professionals than it does male pros, primarily because of the similar distance that male hacks and female pros hit the ball. The male pros, such as Pavin, are in a world of their own.

The impact on my life is clear. If I rely on the October issue's advice and still can't hit a fairway wood, I can't claim sexism. Both a guy and a gal will have been of no use.

- Quickly: Sept. 24 New York Review of Books is worth Joan Didion on the Democratic National Convention and Garry Wills on the Republicans. Didion, clearly a Jerry Brown partisan (she has put him up at her New York home), derides Bill Clinton as more intent on looking as if he's advocating something than actually advocating something, while Wills is good underscoring Republican hypocrisy in claiming to want ''less government'' but making heroes of various authority figures. Meanwhile, Joe Klein's Sept. 21 Newsweek analysis of Clinton (''Soul on Ice'') is similar to Didion's as he notes how Clinton's campaign ''feels synthetic, too carefully focus-grouped.''

- October Robb Report, in a feature on the most elite tennis resorts, notes that some of these expensive joints may be rather harsh on your body because they use hard courts to keep down their maintenance costs. Thus, you could return home with a great backhand and tan but tendinitis in a knee.